Who runs this
John Morrow founded Managers & Directors in 1998. The firm started in governance and mentoring, working alongside owners and directors of mid-sized businesses on the questions that come with running and growing them: who sits on the board, how decisions get made, how the next generation gets prepared, how disputes get handled before they break things. The executive search practice grew out of that work. Owners who'd been worked with on structural questions started asking John to find them the people to run the next stage of the business. Mentor matching is the natural close of the loop: thirty years of finding people, applied now to finding mentors.
What the buyer gets, in plain terms, is access to John's judgement on who would actually help. Not a researcher. Not a consultant. Not a panel. The brief is taken by John, the search is run by John, and the shortlist is built and presented by John. He stays alongside the client through the interviews and up to the placement, then steps out of the mentoring relationship and lets the mentor and client run the engagement directly.
Search is a remote discipline by nature. Most of the work is done by video (Teams or whichever platform the client uses), with email for the asynchronous detail and the occasional phone call where it's faster. John meets clients and candidates face to face by exception rather than by routine. The method has been built around that reality for thirty years and works the same way for a Sydney brief as it does for any other. What stays close to the client is the judgement and the network. The geography that matters in this engagement is the city the mentor is in: Sydney.
The firm
Managers & Directors Pty Ltd is the firm that contracts with you for any engagement. Established in 1998. ABN 43 082 518 778. Registered for GST. The engagement letter, the brief, the search, the shortlist pack, and the post-placement check-in are all run by the firm, and John is the principal who delivers each of them personally.
Business Mentors Sydney is the trading name under which Managers & Directors runs mentor matching for Sydney business owners. The firm has been operating in governance, mentoring, and executive search since 1998, and the matching service draws on what those decades have actually built: a working network of senior people John knows personally, accumulated through twenty-plus years of executive search and mentor placement.
That network has always been the asset. Anyone with a LinkedIn account can find a chairman of a publicly listed company, a current or former CEO, a managing director who's run a tech business through a sale, or the principal of a family-run investment office. Reaching the email address is trivial. Getting an answer that goes beyond polite acknowledgement is something else, and it's what the search engagement is paying for. John has spent 30 years building, maintaining, and renewing the relationships that make those calls answered and those mentor approaches taken seriously.
A search isn't a question of whether the people exist; it's a question of finding the four-way match. The brief, the mentor's operating background, the mentor's willingness to take the engagement at this point in their career, and the personal fit between mentor and client. All four have to line up. The mentors in the network aren't professional mentors; they're senior operators (current and former CEOs, chairs, managing directors, executives) who take an engagement when the brief calls for what they've spent their career learning and the client is someone they actually want to invest time in. Most do a handful of engagements across their career; the mentors who turn out to be particularly strong might do five or more. None of them are building a mentoring practice. They're paid market rates because that's what keeps the relationship a professional one, but the reason they take the engagement is that they want the experience they've built to land somewhere it'll actually be used.
The firm is small in headcount and structured in network reach. There is no team of search consultants behind John, no offshore back office, no panel of mentors waiting in queue. What you're hiring is a 30-year search practice run by one experienced principal whose primary asset is who picks up when he calls.
Why mentor matching
Mentoring is the right kind of help when the value you need is experience. Not skills training (a coach will do that better), not a project to be delivered (hire a consultant), not governance and oversight (appoint a board member or chair), not in-house capacity (hire someone). Mentoring is what you want when you're facing a stage of the business that's unfamiliar to you, you'd benefit from talking it through with someone who has personally been somewhere similar, and the conversations work better as ongoing dialogue than as a delivered output. The value compounds across sessions over a year or more, not from any single conversation.
The cadence and the structure of the engagement are decisions the matching gets right or wrong. Some mentors run short weekly catch-ups that build a working rhythm with the client. Some meet monthly with longer sessions and let the issues set the agenda. Some prefer the boardroom; some prefer lunch. Some bring a structured frame to the conversation; some are entirely conversational. None of those styles is the right one in the abstract. The right one for you is the one that fits how you work, what you need to be challenged on, and what kind of mentor you'd actually look forward to seeing. Matching the style is part of matching the mentor.
The matching is judgement-based, not algorithmic. There are no psychometric tests, no personality questionnaires, no compatibility scoring. What's behind it is John's judgement applied to two questions: who, in the network, has the right operating background to land the brief, and who would actually click with this client as a person. That second question is the harder one and it's where 30 years of executive search and mentor placement does its real work. A bad match between two senior, good-faith people produces a relationship that goes nowhere; the calls feel professional, the advice is sound, the rapport never deepens, and the engagement quietly winds down. A good match produces conversations that change how the owner thinks. The asset of this firm is being able to narrow the network down to the three or so people most likely to work for this client, then put those people in front of the client and let the client decide. Faster and more honest than any psychometric tool, and it's the work the engagement fee is buying.
Who the service is for, and who it isn't
The service is built for owner-managed businesses in Sydney with annual turnover typically between $5 million and $25 million, though anything from $1 million up qualifies. Below $1 million the model doesn't fit; the engagement fee and the mentor sessions sit above what most businesses at that scale need or can comfortably absorb. Above $25 million, most of the time the service still works, though once you're at $50 million or more, what you usually need is closer to executive mentoring than the matching the BMS model is designed for. We can have that conversation on the call.
The decision-maker on the buy side is the owner or the founder. Most are running businesses they started or bought, and the typical situation is that the business has grown to a size they haven't run before. Team size sits around 5 to 50 staff, with a small leadership group sitting underneath the owner. Most clients are in their 30s or 40s; a few are in their late 20s or 50s. The work is private sector, broadly any industry: professional services, trades, manufacturing, technology, hospitality, retail, agriculture, anything that's owner-led and commercial. We can take engagements with not-for-profits where there's budget for it. We don't take public sector or government engagements.
The service tends to land well with owners who have grown the business to a point where the next stage is structurally different from what got them here. The early growth phase usually rewards energy and instinct. The next phase often requires letting go of decisions, building structure, dealing with people problems that didn't exist when the business was smaller, and having a sounding board who has personally been through the same kind of transition. That's the buyer profile the matching is built for.
The service isn't right for everyone. If you're looking for someone to deliver a specific project (a financial model, a strategy document, a system implementation), hire a consultant. If you want skills-based training (sales technique, presentation skills, public speaking), hire a coach. If your business is in genuine distress (insolvency risk, severe legal exposure, or a partner dispute heading toward litigation), what you need is a turnaround specialist, an insolvency practitioner, or a lawyer; the mentor model isn't built for distress and most senior mentors won't take engagements in those situations even if asked. If your sector is highly specialised in a way that means very few suitable mentors exist anywhere, the search may take longer and the engagement fee may sit at the Specialist Match end; we'll tell you that on the call.
If your situation matches the conditions and the cost makes sense, the first call is the place to find out whether the model fits you specifically. We don't take every engagement. Some calls end with us recommending the buyer talk to a consultant, a coach, a turnaround specialist, or someone else. The reasoning is direct: a buyer engaged into the wrong service ends up with a mentor who can't help, a client who's disappointed, a mentor who won't pick up the phone next time we call, and a fee paid for work that didn't fit. Better to be honest on the call and point the buyer where they actually need to go.